The Queen's Secret
Read The Queen's Secret Online
Authors: Victoria Lamb
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #General
About the Book
July 1575
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, arrives at Kenilworth Castle amid pomp, fanfare and lavish festivities laid on by the Earl of Leicester. The hopeful earl knows this is his very last chance to persuade the queen to marry him.
But despite his attachment to the queen and his driving ambition to be her king, Leicester is unable to resist the seductive wiles of Lettice, wife of the Earl of Essex. And soon whispers of their relationship start spreading through the court.
Enraged by the adulterous lovers’ growing intimacy, Elizabeth employs Lucy Morgan, a young black singer and court entertainer, to spy on the couple. But Lucy, who was raised by a spy in London, uncovers far more than she bargains for.
For someone at Kenilworth that summer is plotting to kill the queen. No longer able to tell friend from foe, it is soon not only the queen who is in mortal danger – but Lucy herself.
Contents
In memoriam
Charlotte Lamb, 1937–2000
Prologue
The outskirts of London, May 1575
LUCY MORGAN PEERED OVER THE HIGH WOODEN SIDE OF THE
swaying cart. A group of soldiers trotted past, sunlight glinting off their helmets, their dusty blue livery announcing their allegiance to Lord Leicester. Staring back down the road, she could no longer see the distant towers of Richmond Palace, their bright pennants fluttering in the breeze off the River Thames, but only wooded hills and high green hedgerows as the road deepened into countryside.
‘I’ve never been so far outside London before.’ She glanced around, but no one in the cart seemed to be listening. Some of the older women were slumped over, asleep in the sunshine, their mouths open. The carts had left London just after dawn and Lucy was tired too, but unwilling to miss anything by closing her eyes. ‘Where will we sleep tonight? How will they feed so many of us?’
The woman to her right, plain-faced and soberly dressed in widow’s black, tugged irritably at her gown. ‘Sit down, girl.’ Her voice was sour. ‘The cartmen are staring.’
But Lucy did not want to sit down. Even the six months she had spent at court had not prepared her for the activity of the past few days, watching Queen Elizabeth’s servants make ready to depart London for the summer months. Wagon after wagon had lumbered off in advance of the Queen’s private entourage,
creaking
with furniture, chests packed with clothes and books, the bric-a-brac of the royal household. Nor had she expected this sweating crush of bodies, jammed in against each other with little more dignity than plague victims flung on a cart. She had seen royal officials and their wives crowded together with their liveried servants, lowly stable boys and gongmen riding the covered wagons of the provisions train, potmen shouting crudely to each other above the grind of wheels, and the women of the Queen’s household crammed without ceremony into old wooden carts without seats: seamstresses, laundresses, cooks, serving maids, and court entertainers like herself.
At that moment their cart juddered over a deep yawning rut and Lucy gave a cry, clutching at the side to save herself from falling.
‘I told you to sit down,’ the woman beside her remarked, and folded her arms as though satisfied that she had been proved right, closing her eyes against the sun’s glare.
Lucy had come to court the autumn before, at the age of fourteen, and this was her first summer progress. The court had rarely stayed in any one residence above seven or eight weeks that first autumn. Even once the cold weather had set in, they had been forced to pack up and move to another royal residence as soon as the stink of human refuse grew too powerful to be ignored. It was not always a good thing to be in a new place. In one of the smaller houses, out on the periphery of the city, the female entertainers had slept in a curtained-off corner of the dining hall, and at another place had been herded ten to a chamber, sleeping on filthy rushes through a lack of bedding. The stench had become so bad, it had been almost impossible to breathe some nights, let alone sleep.
Now this: a sweet-smelling wind in her hair, newborn lambs in the fields, eglantine and the white wood anemone shining out from the hedgerows.
The widow tut-tutted as Lucy settled back on the floor of the cart, wriggling to make herself more comfortable on the unyielding wooden boards. There was little room for them all in the open cart and the boards bristled with splinters, making any sudden movements risky. It did not help that two of the
seamstresses
were fat-necked, broad-chested peahens, slumped drowsily with clog-heavy feet shoved out in front of them, taking up more than their fair share of space.
‘Sorry, mistress,’ Lucy offered, more from politeness than genuine concern, having accidentally jabbed the older woman in the ribs as she tried to find a more comfortable position.
‘Did your mother never tell you not to fidget, girl?’
‘I cannot tell you,’ Lucy countered sharply, ‘for I never knew my mother.’
She wished she had kept silent as both seamstresses raised their plump, pink-cheeked faces to stare across at her, suddenly no longer asleep. Uncomfortably aware that she was the centre of attention, Lucy added hurriedly, ‘My mother died when I was born, you see, God rest her soul.’
The widow crossed herself superstitiously, muttering a quick prayer under her breath. But at least she shifted sideways after that, drawing her cloak a little closer. This gave Lucy room to settle her buttocks squarely on the hard boards, balancing on her palms as the jolting cart rattled on into the countryside.
It was a common enough reaction. A black girl was strange enough in England. But a motherless black girl was bad luck, a curse, someone to be avoided – almost as though Lucy had taken a hand in her own mother’s death. Which was true in a way, she supposed, since her mother had died giving birth to her. Or so Master Goodluck had told her.
It was not only the superstitious who shunned her, of course. The kindly gentleman who had employed her at court last autumn had praised her singing, saying with astonishment that she had ‘a voice like a skylark’. Yet Lucy had not yet been permitted to do more than sing with the chorus and dance in a few of the set pieces performed each month before the visiting ambassadors and dignitaries. Perhaps old Mistress Hibbert, who supervised the female entertainers, was afraid the Queen would take fright at her African skin and eyes, her unrestrained barley-twists of black hair. So Lucy had been hidden discreetly behind the others every time she sang, hair tamed beneath the smooth white wings of a cap, dark skin concealed by a shawl draped about her shoulders and knotted tight at the throat.
That spring though, the favourite of the troupe, the boastful Peggy, had been found with child and dismissed. Then two of their most experienced singers had come down with the shaking sickness. Even Mistress Hibbert herself, who had hated Lucy from the very first day she arrived at court, had been deemed too old for travel and told to remain behind.
Perhaps this summer, as one of the few sopranos left in the troupe who could sing the full scale, she might at last find herself face to face with Queen Elizabeth – whom she had only ever seen as a pale but beautiful figure above a mass of courtiers’ heads.
‘When does the court return to London?’
The woman next to her had fallen asleep at last, slumped in her black cloak, but one of the heavy-breasted seamstresses opposite gave her a sympathetic smile. She was yellow-toothed, her cheeks flushed from the sun.
‘Summer’s end, child,’ she soothed her. ‘Come September, we’ll all be home again.’
Lucy frowned, trying to suppress a flutter of panic. ‘But it’s only May. Must we stay away so long?’
‘Bless your ignorance,’ the woman laughed comfortably, ‘of course we must, for the Queen herself orders it. Her Majesty won’t risk the plague by staying in the city over the summer, and who can blame her with the stench of the palace sewers so bad last week? So we’re bound for Grafton House now, then we’ll take the road up to Warwickshire and rest a month or so at the castle of Kenilworth, they say – or until the Queen tires of his lordship’s attentions.’
The woman chuckled before continuing, as though at some private joke. ‘Beyond Kenilworth, I cannot tell you which road the progress will take, though it’s rumoured the Queen’s to visit some of the grand houses of Staffordshire this year.’ She smiled at Lucy’s dismayed expression. ‘Thirsty, child?’
Lucy nodded thankfully. She accepted a half-full bottle of ale from under the folds of the seamstress’s rough white apron. The ale was warm – not surprisingly, given its hiding place – but it refreshed her.
‘Thank you. Do you know where we’ll stop tonight?’
‘Wherever there’s a space set aside for us to sleep, my poppet.
And
no need of a hedge, either. A grassy field and a hunk of bread and cheese each, that will do me nicely. For there’ll be no rain tonight to wet us. Not with this hot sun.’
With another chuckle, the seamstress took a generous swig of ale herself, then tucked the bottle safely away under her apron, shooting a surreptitious glance at the sour-faced woman as though to check she had not seen.